Traditional manufacturing processes require at least an eight- to 10-week leadtime. An organization will design the projects and send it to a molder/moldmaker,

who will help them refine the design to obtain the best manufactured results. The shop then produces a mold to manufacture a sample, but the complexity of the design in creating the mold can add even more leadtime to the estimated eight to 10 weeks.
There is a lot of labor involved from the toolmaker,It could take 300 to 400 hours. That’s nearly 70 percent of the time it takes to produce the mold.

Prior to identifying digital manufacturing as an alternative to soft tooling, many molders/mold shops used urethane casting to create models. That process is slowly disappearing because the urethane molds wear out after a few uses, which means creating a new one if testing is still in progress.

That can prove costly both from a materials and resources perspective.
If a fixture is needed and the design is simple, a 2-D sketch will suffice for aluminum tooling. For more complex geometries, where a 3-D design is necessary, engineers use 3-D CAD and digital manufacturing processes to capture all of the intricate dimensions of the design. For example, a fixture with arcs, curves and angles is a better fit for digital manufacturing.